1. Technical Field
Systems and methods disclosed herein relate to the field of telecommunication and, more specifically, to systems and methods that resource allocation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Communication networks facilitate the exchange of data between or among various electronic devices, such as mobile stations (MSs), base stations (BSs), access points, cellular phones, personal digital assistants, radios, personal computers, notebooks, workstations, global positioning devices, servers, and other devices that may be used to transmit and/or receive data. The increased use of electronic devices has resulted in an increased demand for high-speed, reliable, and secure transmission of data, via communication networks.
To transmit data accurately and with high speeds a conventional base station encapsulates data to generate data frames, and subsequently transmits the generated data frames. As is illustrated in FIG. 1, a data frame 102 may be referred to as a super-frame and may be of a fixed length, for example, 20 ms. The information included in super-frame 102 is defined by using bits of data.
Super-frame 102 may include a predetermined number of sub-frames 104a-n. Each sub-frame may include of a plurality of resource blocks 106a-n and control blocks 108a-n. There may be one control block for every n contiguous sub-frames, which may include information used by mobile stations or other nodes in a network to access resource blocks within the n sub-frames. For example, control block 108a may include information describing resource blocks 106a in sub-frame 104a and subsequent sub-frames.
Resource blocks 106a may be arranged in a manner disclosed in FIG. 1. For example, there may be five resource blocks 110, 112, 114, 116, and 118, within resource block 106a, and control block 108a may include information describing the properties, the location, and/or the sizes of resource blocks 110, 112, 114, 116, and 118. For example, control block 108a may include information describing resource block 110 by providing information with respect to starting point 120, length 122, and width 124. Similarly, control block 108a may including information regarding starting point 126, length 128, and width 130 to describe resource block 112. The description information in the control blocks may be read out by mobile stations to access the resource blocks. The time and resources required to process this information may affect transmission speeds and may increase overhead caused due to transmission of excess and redundant data during communication.
In conventional data frames, the mobile station has to decode every control block to access the resource blocks belonging to the mobile station. When control blocks appear in high frequency, for example in every downlink sub-frame, the mobile station must function continuously to receive control blocks and decode each control block to determine the location of resource blocks belonging to the mobile station. The decoding of each control block requires excess processing and is not be power-efficient. Furthermore, control blocks in conventional data frames describe resource blocks in four parameters, x-axis starting point, y-axis starting point, block length, and block width, which may require unnecessary data bits and may not be space-efficient. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide methods and apparatus directed to the shortcomings noted above.